Safety drives rapid growth for Spex

The firm, which develops technologies to improve well control during oil and gas extraction, was yesterday ranked as the country’s fourth-fastest growing technology company in the Sunday Times Tech Track 100.

The ranking is based on companies’ sales growth rates over the previous three years, with Spex achieving 259% in the three years to December 2012.

According to the Tech Track 100, Spex, which employs 80 staff, most recently recorded sales of £34.4 million, making it by far the company in Tech Track’s top five with the largest revenues. Much of its strong growth has come in the wake of BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster and increased demand for oil and gas safety products.

Its revenues have been particularly boosted by a couple of big deals with Shell over the past year. Most recently Spex signed a development deal with Shell for its Emergency Severance Tool (EST).

The EST forms an integral part of the drilling riser – the large diameter pipe that connects the rig to the seabed and is positioned just above the blow-out preventer (BOP).

All drilling wells feature BOP safety valves, but there is a limit to their shearing capacity, and they are often unable to shear through large diameter of heavy-walled items being run into the well – items the industry has termed non-shearables.

If there is an uncontrolled event, similar to BP’s Macondo disaster, the EST is trigged and will sever the non–shearable item that is otherwise obstructing the BOP, allowing the severed drillstring to fall into the well, and enabling the BOP to safely close and seal.

As well as fully designing, manufacturing and testing the EST on behalf of Shell Houston, once the product is commercial SPEX is licensed to manufacture, sell and service the EST on a global basis.

Spex was also recently praised by business secretary Vince Cable for the development of its supercomputer, The Claymore, capable of carrying out in excess of 100 trillion operations per second (104 teraflops).